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C65 in eBay...OMG!

J

jltursan

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Ultra rare Commodore 65 + Ram-expansión/c65/dx64/c90 Prototype, working!

Never seen one so complete, seems to have every piece of hardware developed for this machine!

I guess that it's going to reach a much much higher price than it has right now...:rolleyes:

That brings to my mind the ongoing Mega65 project, it has been going now for a couple of years but seems that they're close of their objectives.
 
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That'll fetch Steve Jobs association kind of money assuming international bidders can all find it.
 
falter said:
How about we all put in for it and then just share custody? :)
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I wish we could do that with all our computers. Who wouldn't want to rotate their stock on a regular basis?

We half heartedly talked about jointly purchasing a city on another (larger) forum. I thought that was an excellent idea.
 
Okay, about USD$17,000 now. Exactly what makes this so valuable? It isn't the first computer made by Commodore.
What's surprising is the number of low- or no-feedback bidders.

What does this machine do that others won't?
 
I've often wondered if a 'Vintage Computer Co-Op' could work... everyone pays a membership fee and units are acquired and shuffled around like library books. Shipping would be a definite downfall though.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Okay, about USD$17,000 now. Exactly what makes this so valuable? It isn't the first computer made by Commodore.

What does this machine do that others won't?
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Probably not much.. I don't think being a prototype there's much software for the actual '65' part of it (as opposed to 64 emulation on it). But that's not what it's about.. it's about Commodore's dying days, a whole slew of what-ifs, and the ability to brag to all the other insane Commodore heads that you have something most of them don't.
 
Let's remember. How many Commodore 64 users were there?

We all looked forward to the C128 and some bought it and it was a great disappointment to everyone. It was an awesome machine, but almost no one took advantage of its best features. So everyone that didn't have it thought it was just an awkward almost-C64.

But then the C65 rumours came about. That was the dream machine everyone wanted. Every 64 user who read the specs of the C65 wanted one, badly. We passed on Amigas because we waited for the C65. We waited and waited and...

If everyone had been a PC user at that time and rumours came about an 8GHz 80486 based machine with SVGA graphics with 24 bit colour (remember that this is back when computers were something to be passionate about, they weren't same-ol commodities), would you be talking about insane IBM cloneheads? Of course not, because in retrospect it's not absurd to think AT clones are the thing to have.
 
I'm only kidding about the insane Commodore heads. But you have to admit.. some of the heavy duty Commodore fans reach Trekkie levels of devotion.

I had a 64 for eons like everyone else. The 128 was a footnote to me, especially after my first encounter with an Amiga. To me, critics of the 65 pegged it right. It would have made sense in 1985.. but not 1991. By then most of us were jumping ship to real computers with detachable keyboards that we were used to at work and compatible with 90% of the rest of the world. Oh, and we had VGA, so now even the Amiga's storied graphics weren't so amazing. Why would we go for something that was a step down from that? In 1991 I had no use for my 64 other than an occasional nostalgia trip. Once good games started appearing for PC.. it didn't even get used for that. No way would I have entertained spending good money on a 65.
 
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I passed up a C65 twenty years ago for $250. I wouldn't buy one today for more than that. But at that price point I'd be tempted. I don't have any money though. If I had half a million dollars in the bank, I'd toss 500k at that thing in a heartbeat. Why? Because I could. I probably wouldn't let on that I had it, and since I still have 300k sitting in the bank, I could spend 20 hours a week writing killer programs for it.

The idea of AT clones being "real computers" never set in for me. In 1995 my C64 could do things my 5160 couldn't do. It played games better than the 80386 based AT clone I had from 91-93. By the time PC graphics actually caught up with the Amiga, we had PC style video cards for Amiga. To this day I'd rather use an Amiga for day to day productivity than a Windows machine. Because I'm a Commodore lunatic? No, because I understand the value of the Amiga way and I know how to make it work for me. Not much different than the way I drive a 30 year old car to work every day. I also know how to eke every ounce of productivity possible out of a stock C64. Why? Because I can. If it was good enough for me in 1987, it's good enough to do the things it did back then now. I make parts on a CNC milling machine that was made in 1977. Why? Because it still does what it did then. And it's fun being one of maybe a dozen people in the world determined enough to make it work. It's as fun today as it was the first time I did back when it was still too new for most people to want to understand it.


Why did I take that video? It was the first time since 1996 that I needed to make that kind of cut, something I yoosta hafta do every day. Nostalgia? Sure, maybe, but the job had to get done first.
 
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I imagine that if the Apple IIgs was never produced and all that existed were prototypes, the Apple II crowd would covet it same as the Commodore 65.

FWIW, I don't get it either. There's no real software to speak of and clearly the Amiga was a more capable machine. I don't understand what Commodore was thinking when they were developing it since they already had Amiga in the bag long before.
 
I always thought that they priced the Amiga out of the reach of the C64 owners, and so they thought they could keep two markets going the same way that Apple (erroneously) thought they could. But someone at Commodore must have realised late that they'd kill the Amiga by finishing the C65. In retrospect it's a shame because they effectively killed Amiga with the A4000 anyway. They didn't know how to sell Amiga, but C65 would have sold itself.

But I agree. If the GS was only a prototype, this auction would look insignificant.
 
KC9UDX said:
I always thought that they priced the Amiga out of the reach of the C64 owners, and so they thought they could keep two markets going the same way that Apple (erroneously) thought they could. But someone at Commodore must have realised late that they'd kill the Amiga by finishing the C65. In retrospect it's a shame because they effectively killed Amiga with the A4000 anyway. They didn't know how to sell Amiga, but C65 would have sold itself.
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I suppose. IIRC when my folks bought me an Amiga 500 in 1990/91 it was around $500 retail (-monitor), but the retailer (WaldenSoftware) bundled it with a bunch of coupons that took some of the sting out. Still, I think my folks paid close to that for our Commodore 64 setup in 1984 though (again, - monitor). In either case I think they paid close to $250 for a 14" composite and then RGB color monitors after buying each.
 
I saw Amigas advertised in magazines and catalogs and they were far out of my price range. No recollection of what the prices actually were. Then in 87 or 88 I saw them on display at Crazy TV Lenny's American of Madison, and was completely unimpressed. The demo software was horrible. I had the impression that the machine was pretty comparable to my C64 except that it had more colours!

So I never considered them again until in 1995 a guy owed me a significant amount of money and couldn't pay. So he tried to convince me to take his A500 in stead. He couldn't get it to work when he was showing it to me. The disk drive wouldn't read any disk completely. But I was utterly astounded at the graphic and sound capability from that little unexpanded 7MHz machine.
 
geoffm3 said:
I suppose. IIRC when my folks bought me an Amiga 500 in 1990/91 it was around $500 retail (-monitor), but the retailer (WaldenSoftware) bundled it with a bunch of coupons that took some of the sting out. Still, I think my folks paid close to that for our Commodore 64 setup in 1984 though (again, - monitor). In either case I think they paid close to $250 for a 14" composite and then RGB color monitors after buying each.
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That would have been after Motorola cut prices of all 68000 series chips by 50% which allowed Commodore to reduce the Amiga 500 price from the original $700. Before then, the C65 at an estimated price of $300 had a much better market possibility, especially considering the limited Motorola production. 1990's price change was matched with Motorola increasing production to roughly 1 million 68000 series (all models) CPUs per month. That rather caps total potential sales of the Amiga.
 
I'm trying to remember my PC timeline. Our first PC (PCjr) arrived around 85, when we moved into our new house. I distinctly remember being disappointed that the 64 didn't have King's Quest. We went from the jr to the PC (huge disappointment from a games perspective), then to a PS/2. Which my Dad traded for an AT (with CGA graphics.. blech) when I complained of the lack of a 5.25". But yeah.. I think we went back to VGA in 1990 and that was it. But the real C64 killer was probably the NES we got in 86. That ended the c64's cachet as a games machine. Between that and the PC.. there just wasn't a place at the table for Commodore.

I'm sure there were lots of Commodore loyalists who kept their machines running years after the PC won the war. But I think Commodore was always doomed once guys like my Dad started needing to do some of their work at home, on PCs like they had at the office. In fact, the only time my Dad even remotely considered an Amiga was when I told him about the XT card for it. The 65, had it been released earlier probably would have delayed the inevitable by only minutes.
 
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I enjoyed the C64 games. I did not enjoy the Famicom. I also couldn't live without being able to write my own games and productivity software.

In 1991 the C64 got taken off the desk for a shiny new AT clone with a top of the line SVGA card. It took a couple of weeks to get it working due to a defective power supply. And then I bought a bunch of games. I'll never forget playing those stupid four colour games and reading the fine print on the back of the box 'Commodore 64 version shown". I was infuriated. But if I mailed in a coupon and payment they'd send me the EGA version...
 
krebizfan said:
That would have been after Motorola cut prices of all 68000 series chips by 50% which allowed Commodore to reduce the Amiga 500 price from the original $700. Before then, the C65 at an estimated price of $300 had a much better market possibility, especially considering the limited Motorola production. 1990's price change was matched with Motorola increasing production to roughly 1 million 68000 series (all models) CPUs per month. That rather caps total potential sales of the Amiga.
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Yeah, I remember thinking Amiga stuff up to that point was sky-high. We were cross-shopping the Amiga with the ST and the Macintosh when we ultimately purchased the Amiga. The ST was slightly cheaper at that point, not by much, but it seemed pretty clear that it was a dead-end at that point while the Amiga seemed to still have some legs. The Macintosh was well out of reach.

I do recall being blown away by the Amiga though back to 1987 when the local store first had a demo machine (but still no units on the shelf, it was a special order item at that point). The demos that were used were the Newtek Demo Reel, Psygnosis Menace, the game Unreal, a Psygnosis demo disk (with screenshots and music from several games), of course the Juggler, and some of the AmigaBASIC demos.

In retrospect playing some old Amiga games that I thought were amazing back then didn't have as much replay value. That's of course not universally the case as there are a number of stand-outs, but it seems like an awful lot of them were programs that had a great soundtrack and some nice graphics that just happened to have a game attached to them that wasn't very good. ;)
 
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